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Category: Blogging (page 23 of 84)

February 25, 2008

Do you want to understand what Web 2.0 means in your own life? On the internet, Socrates would have lived

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I just wrote this in a comment to Kevin Tomlinson, but it’s important, so I want to address it in the larger arena:

On the internet, everything is Kevlar.

This is for real, and it’s a lesson people are slowly learning all over the globe:

  1. Muscle power accumulates, brain power does not. A group of people is no smarter than its smartest member, and the sclerosis imposed by group decision-making will tend to make a typical group seem to behave as though it were dumber than its dumbest member.
  2. Groups cannot interdict the flow of information, so there is no longer any way to prevent most of the people on earth from discovering anything they wish to know. The middle-men who have been disintermediated first were the people who wanted to prevent the other members of their groups from gaining free access to the truth.
  3. Even when they manage to cohere, groups have no power where they cannot amass muscles or accumulate weapons.
  4. In consequence, any competent individual can take on and defeat any group of people on the internet, no matter how large it might be.

Ergo, on the internet, Socrates would have lived.

This is the triumph of the Greek ideal, an amazing, world-changing accomplishment.

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February 25, 2008

The language of real estate is photography; here’s how we talk in pictures with buyers, with sellers and with our vendor partners

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’m kicking this back to the top. I posted this a week ago Saturday, but I think it might have gotten lost in the shuffle. If you saw it then, carry on with my apologies. But Mike Farmer’s comment to my Arizona Republic column about single-property weblogs made me think we might want to revisit these ideas. –GSS]

 
We talk in pictures, Cathleen and I do, as Realtors.

We’ve shown you this before, a lot of different times, but I don’t know if the point has sunk in.

We always have our digital cameras with us, and we’re always prepared to use photographs to illustrate what we are saying — whether we’re talking to sellers, to buyers, to relocators, to investors or to our vendor partners.

That much is as it should be — we all should be talking in pictures as much as possible.

It’s at the next step where I think we have a real advantage.

We’ve shown you our slide-show-based web sites before. We do these for single-property web sites/weblogs, but we also use them to preview homes for buyers, to document construction on new builds, to give sellers staging advice or to make a record of our staging efforts. We begin with the idea that we are going to talk in pictures, and then we do that comprehensively, in the most efficient way we can.

And how would that be?

We do it with software, of course.

I’ve written quite a bit about the application we call Slide Show Marge, but when I started doing things this way, I built my pages by hand, using search-and-replace tools and typing a lot.

We’ve been through Slide Show Bob, Slide Show Mel and several versions of Slide Show Marge, producing thousands of web pages, hundreds of discrete web sites. We knew we would be best able to communicate ideas about real estate in pictures, and we did that with alacrity.

Okay. With that as introduction, take a look at this website I made for a Usonian home in North Phoenix. I took these photos in July of 2005, and I hand-crafted a very similar website then. We were previewing this Read more

February 25, 2008

A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web

I have an unshakable faith in the three P’s of home marketing — Price, Preparation and Presentation.

If the home is priced above its value to the buyer it will not sell in this market — it probably won’t even show.

If it is not well-prepared — repaired, staged, cleaned — to the condition implied by the price, it will not sell even if it does show.

Presentation is your Realtor’s job — or yours if you’re trying to sell without representation. I don’t have space to go into a full-blown marketing plan, but here’s an idea that can make a big difference for very little cost:

Give your home a blog.

Every home for sale should have its own web site. What makes a weblog useful and practical is that weblogging software is so easy to use. And the price to get started? Nothing.

Sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.com will let you set up a blog on a subdomain — an address like 123MulberrySt.WordPress.com — for free. Or you can buy your own domain — 123MulberrySt.com — for less than ten bucks a year. You can host your own domain for a few dollars a month, but using your weblog provider’s hosted option will work just as well.

What do you want for content? Photos — and lots of them. Good pictures of clean, well-lit rooms sell houses. Your text should be just-the-facts, nothing overtly promotional. Not only can people see through hype, it turns them off.

With a weblog, you can document your house room by room — or by the benefits to be realized from the home’s features and amenities.

Best of all, you’ll have a 24-hour salesperson working for you on the internet. Put your blog’s address on your flyers, in any advertising you do, in your Craigslist open house notices, on Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The more you can promote your blog, the more traffic it will draw.

You still have to be priced right. You still have to be prepared Read more

February 25, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: The art of rhetoric — and the rhetoric of art

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As I said yesterday, I had already picked this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, so I didn’t include his posts among the Short List of nominees. Instead, I’ll present them here. The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Mike Farmer for his tour de force series of posts on Web 2.0 and the real estate practitioner. Mike had an astounding thirteen posts on the Long List last week, but the eight posts (!) cited here are a cut above everything I saw last week. These are Mike’s essays, in chronological order:

If you didn’t read them — or didn’t read them all — making the time will repay your effort. Cathy and I were talking about thanking authors for the gifts they bear — not as fawning fan mail but as a simple expression of gratitude. I’ll thank Mike now for this compendium, and I hope you will take a second to do the same by email or in a comment on his weblog.

The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Set Godin for Advice for real estate agents (quit now!):

The second asset to build is permission. It turns out (according to the NAR) that 91% of all Realtors never contact the buyer or the seller of a home after the closing. Not once. Wow. Someone just spent a million dollars with you and you don’t bother to call or write?

The opportunity during the current pause (and yes, it’s a pause) is to find, one by one, the people who would benefit from hearing from you and then earn the right to talk to them. Earn the right to send them a newsletter or a regular update or a subscription to your blog. NOT to talk about what matters to you, but to give them information (real information, not just data) that matters to them. Visit Read more

February 25, 2008

Egoism in action: What should you do when a half-assed sock puppet makes a half-decent joke?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Laugh, of course:

What’s the difference between BloodhoundBlog and a porcupine?

With the porcupine the pricks are on the outside.

It’s quoted from Dustin Luther’s High Temple of Unidirectional Virtue. (“Where poking fun at other people is always wrong, except when we’re doing it.”)

The joke is stolen, of course, but it’s still funny. Anyway, who expects originality from trolls?

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February 24, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have 16 entries on the short list this week, out of an astoundingly long long list of 104 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Athol Kay -- Sunshine Is The Bomb Sunshine Is The Bomb For Real Estate Photos”,
“Brian Brady — Gene Simmons: Originality is Overrated Gene Simmons: Originality is Overrated“,
“Brian Brady — Sins Writers Commit The Two Sins Writers Commit That Business Bloggers Can’t Afford“,
“Chad Smith — Starbucks Wi-Fi Starbucks Makes Decision That Could Save Real Estate Agents Money“,
“Cheryl Johnson — Static Page and Blog Page Coexist WordPress: Static Page and Blog Page Coexist“,
“Cheryl Johnson — Using FTP Using FTP“,
“Dan Green — The One-Day Change To Your Closing Date The One-Day Change To Your Closing Date That Will Save You Money“,
“Dave Smith — Hyper Local Blog Market Targeting Hyper Local Blog Market Targeting“,
“Jay Thompson — The Taxman Approacheth The Taxman Approacheth“,
“Jeff Brown — My Topic Wish List I Hope Unchained Considers My Topic Wish List“,
“Jim Cronin — Not Your Competition 7 Reasons Why Your Local Real Estate Blogging Peers Are Not Your Competition“,
“Jim Cronin — Website Working Against Your Career? Is Your Website Working Against Your Real Estate Career?“,
“Paul Chaney — Keyword-optimized blog posts Don’t tell me keyword-optimized blog posts don’t get Google’s attention, cause they do!“,
“Reggie Nicolay — ESignature Technology Is ESignature Technology Right For Your Real Estate Business?“,
“Sean Purcell — Think Cat Blog Want Hyper-Local Blogging? Think Cat Blog“,
“Seth Godin — Advice for real estate agents Advice for real estate agents (quit now!)“,
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup Read more

February 24, 2008

Has Web 2.0 Failed YOU?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Louis Cammarosano, of Home Gain, outlines his theory about the failed promise of RE2.0. He offers four thoughts to back up his premise:

1- Success has been marginal.

2- It’s TOO consumer-centric and neglects the real estate professional (I’m still trying to understand how the anonymous presentation from real estate professionals, at Home Gain, really puts the REALTOR out in front.)

3- User-generated content is biased and therefore irrelevant.

4- Re.net adopters are somewhat smug in our “secret” which eventually turns people off.

Louis is new to weblogging so I want to be welcoming. He’s also a big boy and can handle himself so I will pay him the compliment of being blunt. He started his weblog with the initial purpose of communicating with his subscribers. When he invited a bunch of real estate bloggers to contribute, he recognized that Web 2.0 has legs. The very platform he criticizes is the one he employs to deliver that criticism and that…makes no sense.

The kept promise of interactive marketing is independence. We look no farther than my co-contributor (on Home Gain) Jay Thompson for proof of that kept promise; independence. Web 2.0 disintermediates the BROKER and LENDER (in my case) if practiced correctly. It allows you to connect with consumers around the globe. 90% of the consumers are still going to use a real estate agent when buying or selling a home. While that percentage may drop, it will still be overwhelmingly large.

Why? Real estate agents (and mortgage originators) add value. If we can communicate that value proposition, directly to the consumer, without dependency on a Home Gain, a Countrywide, or a RE/MAX, to do our advertising, both we and the consumers win.

I continually proclaim that blogging isn’t the “little purple pill” to cure all of your marketing deficiencies. It is, however, an opportunity for you to find a large number of people, who when employing a long-tail search, want exactly what you can provide.

That’s not failure. That’s power.

February 23, 2008

Why does BloodhoundBlog have a comments policy? In order to prevent my property from being hi-jacked and our contributors and guests from being abused, insulted, maligned and harangued

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dave Barnes, may the gods cherish his every atom, offers up this observation in a comment to another post:

Ardell wrote (on another blog): “Greg blacklists and deletes comments when anyone chooses to argue a point on BHB. You can’t have a conversation there or call them out there. That’s the joke of the whole “let us teach you about WEB 2.0″ thing. AS IF!”

Is this true?

Do you blacklist and delete?

Oh, you bet! We have to.

We don’t blacklist. In all of our thousands of pages, there is no black-bordered list of unpersons. But our comments policy is carefully defined and elaborately documented:

Comments policy: Everyone disagrees with us about something, and we welcome this: It’s how we learn. We encourage a free and spirited debate about the issues we raise here. We police comments with a very light hand, deleting comments and banning commenters only for extreme obscenity, flaming or flame-baiting, plagiarism, spam, impersonation (sock-puppetry) or copyright infringement (a fair-use quotation with a link is fine). This warrants emphasis: We are all about ideas, and, because of that, we are very strict about bad behavior. If you get the notion that your fear or anger or rock-ribbed moral fire accords you the right to abuse or insult or brow-beat the other guests in our salon, you will be ejected with dispatch. Nota bene: When you’re done, you’re done. Anyone can make a mistake, but if your behavior is palpably malicious, you will be banned from BloodhoundBlog forever.

I think I’ve probably told you this before, but I have a great respect for you, Dave. I’ve always found you to be open minded, and I don’t think you are one to be swayed by what one might call political considerations — looking good (or bad) in someone else’s eyes. I don’t think this was intended to be a softball question, but, who, practically speaking, tolerates intolerable behavior on his or her own property?

Even so, Brian Brady and I are each playing our own variations of a game we call What would David Gibbons do?, so I am going to take some pains to answer every Read more

February 23, 2008

Living up to the BloodhoundBlog mission statement: We’re everything you wish were in Realtor magazine

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is our mission statement:

BloodhoundBlog is everything you wish were in Realtor magazine — but isn’t.

Damned if it ain’t the gospel truth! Realtor Magazine does a cover story on real estate weblogging — and none of the Bloodhounds are there.

Not sour grapes. We’re the big dogs in this menagerie of minds, but, at the same time — we’re big Bloodhounds. Friendly enough, but fiercely independent and impossible to dominate. Does that sound like Realtor magazine to you?

In fact, the article is mostly a catalog of kiss-ups to potential advertisers, the usual sort of Realtor magazine mash letter.

Even so, congratulations to the real webloggers mentioned in the piece. My thought is that the waxed fruit is there to distract our attention from the rancid vendor stew that is the real purpose of the article. But, even so, the coverage should be huge for building credibility with clients.

(What would David Gibbons do? I’m thinking this is the kind of post that people find objectionable because I am not being falsely effusive about what is, in fact, not a wholly-positive development. I live in a graduated universe, and so I understand that most blessings are mixed. Realtor magazine’s objective — always — is to pimp vendors. This is why we understand, in every other context, that it is largely ridiculous and irrelevant. But — even so — this is a sweet coup for the actual real estate webloggers mentioned in the article. I offer them my heartiest congratulations. And I’m belaboring the obvious, I think.)

Tipped: The Real Estate Tomato.

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February 23, 2008

Bloodhound Blog Remains Open. What Would Beth Ask?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Bombastic blogger, Kevin Tomlinson, knows how to rile up the crowds. Most of you met Kevin through the Project Blogger competition, hosted by Activerain.com. Kevin never disappoints. He made the dramatic statement that he believed…

Bloodhound Blog would be shut down by Friday.

Kevin’s not mean, he just likes a little controversy.

I thought I’d try to practice the WWDGD principle and attempt to get meaningful input from the crowd. I expected to be baited by the irrelevant but chose to ignore them; this conversation is too important for the practitioners. Scroll through the comment thread and you’ll see where Kevin’s broker, Beth Butler, started to go into a state of curiosity rather than remain in a state of judgment.

WWBA (What would Beth Butler Ask?). Russell Shaw swears by surveys so I thought I’d try that approach. Here’s our first installment of WWBA:

For Glenn Kelmann:

1- I think I would ask how his business model changes if :

A. The offer of compensation in the MLS is substantially changed?

B. If IDX is no longer available

2- If the market turns downward, what plans does Redfin have for longevity in a down market… say where mls data shows an overall decrease in the number sales of 50-60% like it has here in the South Florida market?

For Russell Shaw:

1. How is his team organized?

2. How has he used his internet presence to improve his business? Specifically, has he changed or is he planning to change his website? Who does he rely upon for technical support and direction?

3. I understand that Phoenix is having some of the same market challenges as Florida, how has he changed his operations to adjust?

4. With regard to his marketing, what percentage of his marketing budget goes to advertising properties? himself and his brand?

5. Number of listings he expects to carry to obtain 2000 sides? What percentage of his inventory does he sell Read more

February 22, 2008

Search Engine Guide is unleashed, but only the wild dogs are unchained

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jeff Brown found this promotional film for Small Business Marketing Unleashed and passed it on to Brian Brady, who forwarded it to me. Could someone be pulling a Davison on both BloodhoundBlog Unchained and the Daniel Rothamel video?

My take: Synchronicity. As you might recall, Unleashed was one of the names we considered on the way to picking Unchained:

Here is why I like Unchained:

  • The idea of free or even feral dogs
  • Unleashed implies has-been-leashed or will-be-leashed-again, but unchained can suggest never-having-been-chained
  • Again unlike unleashed, unchained has connotations of human slavery or imprisonment, and hence manumission or liberation
  • The word looks and sounds hard and edgy, promoting a hard and edgy graphic representation

These metaphors are not new to me, nor is the metaphor of dancing. I don’t actually care about dancing, but I care a lot about metaphors.

That’s actually kind of interesting as a comprehensive glimpse into our marketing prowess. But Search Engine Guide got to a slightly different place ahead of us.

[This post was redacted to correct factual errors addressed in the comments. –GSS]

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February 22, 2008

Long Beach Realtor Laurie Manny to Speak at Bloodhound Blog UNCHAINED Social Media Marketing Conference in Phoenix, AZ

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

I’m ecstatic about our latest addition to the UNCHAINED faculty.

Laurie Manny, host of Long Beach Real Estate Home, has signed on to discuss how to build a locally-focused real estate weblog. In one short year, Laurie has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the search engines for the competitive keyword phrase “Long Beach Real Estate“. More effective, however, is her complete domination of long tail searches, “downtown long beach real estate“, “goldengate square“, and “oceangate square“. The latter two search terms are buildings in which Laurie has a major market presence.

Alas, search engine placement is nothing if the site doesn’t create fans. Laurie delivers the goods consistently with interesting content, a plethora of guest authors, and detailed market reports. She enjoys commercial success by employing a sophisticated IDX feed and CRM solution.

Laurie cut her teeth on Activerain.com and has strong following of “students” there who model her. She readily shares her success causing many Active Rainers to wonder why Laurie hasn’t had a more prominent, instructional role in RE.net conferences.

Frankly, we couldn’t let her knowledge escape the national spotlight so we invited her to join the faculty of UNCHAINED.

Ask Laurie a question about how she thrives in the rough and tumble world of online real estate marketing and the answer you’ll get will be complete. It’s like taking a sip from a fire hose as she rattles off actionable ideas about how to drive traffic and attract customers.

Leave your raincoat at home but bring a pen and paper. Laurie Manny is UNCHAINED.

PS- When Laurie writes, Active Rainers listen. The smart money is getting seats in the front row before Laurie’s fans hear about this and crash the server.

February 22, 2008

PhotoDropper WordPress plug-in puts zillions of creative-commons-licensed Flickr photos just a click away

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tipped by ProBlogger Darren Rowse, I’m adding the PhotoDropper WordPress plug-in to four of our weblogs this morning.

What is it?

With the Photo Dropper plugin, you can now search millions of Flickr photos and add them to your WordPress posts with just 1 click, all without leaving your WordPress dashboard. Attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. It’s the easiest way to add photos to your blog. Period. And best of all – it’s Free!

I’m not a member of the images-incite-interest delegation. I believe mere prose is sufficient to attract attention if it is the right prose, and I’m only interested in a picture if it does that work that could be done by a thousand words.

But: I am a prototype without a production model, and many people writing here take exactly the opposite position, that pictures can make the post. That’s what makes horse races. And to be completely frank, sometimes the images our authors come up with knock me out.

These are the weblogs I’ve upgraded:

If it seems to work for people, I’ll add it everywhere.

A word of caution: A Creative Commons license does not put an image in the public domain. Russell Shaw, for example, loves to make image mash-ups in photo-editing software. People similarly inclined should make sure the photographer permits you to mess with his or her images, rather than simply displaying them.

How do you use it?

1. Once you have the plugin activated, you will see a “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” panel right under your Write Post (or Write Page) editor. Enter keyword(s) for a photo you would like for your post (Example: “sunset”, “black cat”, or “HDR bridge”) and click the Search button.

2. The search will return photos matching your keywords.

3. Once you find a photo you would like to add to your post, click on any of the sizes (”S”mall, “M”edium, “L”arge) to add that photo and attribution link to your post.

Here’s a Heard Museum photo I snagged in a split second:

Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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